Scintillator-based detectors are used in a variety of applications, including research in nuclear physics, oil exploration, field spectroscopy, container and baggage scanning, and medical diagnostics. When a scintillator material of the scintillator-based detector is exposed to particle radiation, the scintillator material absorbs energy of incoming particles and scintillates, remitting the absorbed energy in the form of photons. A photon sensor of the scintillator-based detector detects the emitted photons.
Scintillator materials useful for detecting neutrons also tend to respond to gamma radiation. To determine the level of neutron radiation, scintillation pulses associated with neutron events are discriminated from scintillation pulses associated with gamma events. Scintillation pulses produced by a neutron interaction often have a slower decay than those produced by gamma interactions. For some configurations of scintillator-based detectors, the difference in scintillator pulse decay permits the use of pulse shape discrimination (PSD) to identify which scintillator pulses relate to neutrons and which relate to gamma interactions.